Jessica Allen’s ’13 Leadership in Multilingual Education at KIPP

Jessica Allen ’13 majored in international affairs and minored in Latin American studies and Spanish during her time at Gordon. She is now a multi-language learner (MLL) specialist at KIPP Academy Boston. We sat down with her to learn more about her career in the world of multilingual education.  

Why did you choose to study international affairs, Spanish and Latin American studies at Gordon?  

I started learning Spanish because I wanted to understand my mom and grandma; they spoke to each other in Spanish when they didn’t want anyone to know what they were saying! My grandma immigrated to the United States from Honduras. I always wanted to learn more about her, Honduran culture and why she moved here, but she never talked about it because she'd had traumatizing experiences growing up in poverty. 

When I got to Gordon, I realized the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. It became not just about Honduras, but also about U.S. relations with Latin America, the language, culture and politics. It's also been part of finding my identity as an Afro-Latina––something very personal to me––and making sense of my place in the world. 

What are KIPP Schools? 

KIPP stands for Knowledge is Power Program. It’s a beautiful national network of public charter schools that prepares students with skills and confidence to create the future they want for themselves, their communities and us all. It's a multifaceted approach; not only does KIPP provide rigorous multilingual education, but they also have the goal of creating joyful classrooms. We see providing space for joy, rigorous academics and family partnership as a form of enacting justice.  

As one of many charter schools in Massachusetts, we can only have a set number of locations as allotted by the state. My KIPP site has grades K-8, but there are other KIPP Schools locations in Lynn, MA, including a high school. We even follow students through college and career to help them with whatever career path they choose.    

What is MLL? What does your role entail? 

Multilingual education has replaced English as a Second Language in many spaces. It’s a similar idea, but the name has changed to place value in students’ first language. Our whole goal is not just to have students learn English but to allow students to also value and leverage their own home language in their second language acquisition. I’m currently co-teaching in English language arts classes with a lead teacher; I identify academic language goals to help give students better access to the material.  

I first look at how we can help students improve their reading, writing, speaking and listening based on the content objective and the academic language being used in the class. Then I teach the language skills needed to access the content objective. What I do additionally really depends on the students’ English language level and what scaffolding or support they need to access the material.  

Sometimes I provide language access on an assignment by chunking the text. That’s when you read the assignment piece by piece with the student, pausing to ask scaffolding questions so they understand what’s going on, and you keep doing that until they’ve finished the most important parts of the text. Language access can also look like adding images to a text or work, having sentence stems on worksheets that students can use to write full sentences or using graphic organizers, just to name a few.   

How did Gordon help you get to the role you have today? 

God has opened several doors for me over my career through my time at Gordon. After college I had an internship at the Washington Office on Latin America. I then got a job at the Department of State thanks to some Gordon connections. But nothing felt like it was suited for me.  

I came back home and tried out some graduate programs, and I reconnected with someone I knew when I worked as a student in Gordon’s Career Services office. She told me her daughter was teaching at a bilingual school in Honduras. I never thought teaching was the route I would take, but that ended up opening a door for me to work there for a year. It was so amazing to work in the country my grandma was from.  

When the pandemic happened I came home and spent time trying to figure out what I was going to do next. When I was at Gordon, I was involved with the Office of Community Engagement, and I volunteered in Lynn at a College Bound tutoring program. We actually visited a KIPP school in Lynn! I remember really loving the idea of bringing high-quality multilingual education to low-income areas in a unique way.  

In 2020 I reached out to the KIPP where I work now and applied, and I’ve been here ever since. I hope my story encourages other students that success or finding your calling isn’t always linear; have patience in the process and trust God.